(In)visible : learning to act in the metaverse

167 Pages·2008·1.736 MB·English

by  Sonvilla-Weiss, Stefan

Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss
(IN)VISIBLE
Learning to Act in the Metaverse
Professor Dr. Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss
ePedagogy Design – Visual Knowledge Building
University of Art and Design Helsinki, TAIK
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Printed by support of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Re-
search Vienna
Cover illustration: Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss
SPIN: 12209118
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008928443
With 19 figure pages
ISBN 978-3-211-78538-6 SpringerWienNewYork
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Contents
Acknowledgements 9

Introduction 10
1 Global Data Space: Early Visionaries 18
Paul Otlet: Information Architect 19
Otto Neurath: Socioscientific Visualization 26
2 Mirror Worlds: The Universe in a Box? 36
Eye in the Sky 41
From Dymaxion to Google Earth 46
Visual Evidence: Aesthetics of (Un)Certainty? 53
Data Visualizations 60
3 Lifelogging: A Concept of Sousveillance? 73
Global Sign Culture 79
Ubiquitous Surveillance 86
Sociospatial Archiving 92
How to Become Invisible 94
4 Blending the Real and the Virtual 102
Metaverse Interplays and Collisions 110
Personal Spaces 113
Spatial Orientation and Navigation 118
Communication, Participation, Exploitation 126
5 Transitory Processes 136
Multiple Perspectives 145
Complexity 147
Practices 148
Notes 156

Image Sources 163
Bibliography 164
Acknowledgments
I am especially thankful for the great opportunity I received in
parallel with my professor appointment in 2003 at the Univer-
sity of Art and Design Helsinki, TAIK, to develop and steer the
international MA program ePedagogy Design – Visual Knowl-
edge Building in cooperation with University Hamburg and
Inholland. Several of my topics of concern stress cross-discipli-
nary thinking and cooperation in contemporary visual media
culture, communication theory and media pedagogy. This book
is thus dedicated to those who have supported my work over
the past years and to those near and far who vitally contrib-
uted to shaping and crystallizing my ideas and concepts: Yrjö
Sotamaa, Martti Raevaara, Juha Varto, Eija Salmi, Lily Diaz,
Owen Kelly from Helsinki, FI, Jaap Jansen (Rotterdam, NL),
Torsten Meyer (Hamburg, D), Henry Jenkins (Boston, USA),
Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe, D), Mel Alexenberg (Petach Tikvah,
IL), Gilles Gervais (Brussels, B), John Tiffin (Wellington, NZ),
Yasutaka Shimizu (Tokyo, JP), my global student community,
co-workers and affiliates.
My deepest gratitude goes to my wife Barbara, my daughter
Felicitas and my son Silvius for their great support and true
allegiance during our wanderings abroad over the past seven
years, first for two years in Brussels, Belgium, and now for the
fifth year in Helsinki, Finland.
Admittedly, without the fabulous online dictionary leo.org,
this work would hardly have seen the light of day. Special thanks
goes to Cindy Kohtala who patiently corrected and transferred
my Austrian English into an understandable version.
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Introduction
How can real and virtual space interactions generate novel
forms of communicative, creative and social practices in global
connected communities? Is it possible to avoid unleashing the
seemingly inevitable dichotomies in humankind constructing
and destroying at the same time? My personal interest in fur-
ther contributing to the complexity of this discussion is to offer
some examples of how the dynamic interplay between technol-
ogy, culture and sciences calls for novel pedagogical forms and
strategies that seek to foster student-centered, self-regulated,
participatory, interactive, and immersive learning.
This book thereby deals with the complexity of the global
data space and its adherent aspects in social, aesthetic and tech-
nological contexts.
To this end I discuss some of the prevalent models of par-
ticipatory media culture, its historical roots and its creative po-
tential for seamless operation in real and virtual environments.
I will also highlight some of the core practices of media produc-
tion, reception and perception with regard to future concepts
of designing and augmenting public and individual data col-
lections for the purpose of creating a gigantic database. In this
global connected info space where there is no longer any onto-
logical difference between the real and the virtual, novel forms
of human-machine interaction will impact tremendously and
pervasively on almost all life issues. Intelligent agents, aug-
mented eyewear, and virtual world avatars and habitats are only
a few existing examples that signal the forthcoming changes in
networked societies.
The ever-increasing possibilities to interact with computer
technology can lead to both techno-utopia and dystopia. A so-
10
Introduction
ciety fully wired and connected is prone to control and sur-
veillance, even though civil counterstrike techniques aim for
equiveillance, a state of equilibrium, or at least a desire to attain
a state of equilibrium, between surveillance and sousveillance.
Are these viable models that will protect us from total control?
To what extent are we captivated in complicity, and how can
we develop alternative strategies and models without pushing
the exit button? And do the virtual and the virtue, interpreted
as inseparable experiences of the factual and the fictive, allow
for another paradigm shift—co-existence seen as a viable future
option in order to survive on this planet?
During the last decade we have seen a nearly all-encompass-
ing approach to the digitalization of knowledge and informa-
tion stored and circulated in private and public domains. Not
only has technology improved in its capacity, pace and scope
following the periodical 18-month cycles of Moore’s Law, but
also our abilities to cope with new cultural techniques com-
monly subsumed under the label ‘digital literacy’. After the rise
and fall of the new economy, reliant as it was on the false as-
sumption of transferring the factory model of mass production
to a completely different concept of an Internet economy, it
took some time to learn from past failures. This new model,
which is based not on scarcity but on abundance, forms the
primary difference between the Internet economy and the real
world. Parallel to the spread of the WWW that emerged out
of academic networks, cooperation and collaboration, the free
software movement and later open source, have become the
congruent architecture and driving force of the Internet up to
the present.
In the pursuit of the apparatus, from Freud’s “prosthesis god”
to “the extension of men” (McLuhan) to wearable computers
(Steve Mann), single user interaction has shifted into multiple
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